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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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I remember a Scottish lady telling us in the ’90s about how they had vans that would drive around to find illegal TVs and the whole thing was just mind-boggling to me!
That's (probably...?) an urban legend that used to be common knowledge in Germany as well (I remember my dad telling me about the vans). They SAY it's not possible to detect TV reception like that buuut....
Edit: yet another thing I know far too little about.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
You can't really detect "TV signals", but you can quite easily detect the 10.125 kHz horizontal line-scanning deflection coil of a CRT. Though I'm fairly sure even if they did originally start effective back in the 1950's because people had very few elecronic devices around, actually detecting anything accurately must have been increasingly difficult as time went on, and a lot of the newer models must have been more about being a scare tactic.